The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has already announced that the International Space Station (ISS), the largest space station ever built, will drop into the point Nemo in the Pacific Ocean in early 2031.
The International Space Station (ISS) is a huge space station built and maintained in low Earth orbit. It is a collaboration of five space agencies: NASA, Roscosmos, JAXA, ESA, and CSA, along with their contractors. But, where will it crash?
What is Point Nemo?
Ever wondered what it looks like when satellites crash on Earth? What will happen if satellites or other space debris fall on civilization? It would be lethal, so the scientists decided on a location that could safely serve as a space graveyard.
The location is known as Point Nemo
The US space agency has already stated that the ISS will fall at Point Nemo, a satellite and spaceship cemetery. It is officially called as the South Pacific Ocean (ic) Uninhabited Area.
It is located in the southern Pacific Ocean, east of New Zealand. All spacecraft that have reached the end of their useful life or mission are routinely wrecked.
Point Nemo represents the marine pole of inaccessibility. It is so far away from any land on Earth that the closest people to it are often on board the ISS. It is approximately 2,688 kilometres from the nearest shore.
The closest land in one direction is Ducie Island, an atoll in the Pitcairn Islands. Even that particular area is empty, so if one were to head north, they would have to travel a little further to locate somebody.
If one travels south, they will arrive to Maher Island in Antarctica, or northeast to Motu Nui Island, another abandoned island near Easter Island.
People frequently assume that Point Nemo is named after the film Finding Nemo, although this is not the case. It was named after Captain Nemo, a legendary submarine sailor from Jules Verne’s novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The name Nemo is derived from a Latin phrase meaning ‘noman’.
Hrvoje Lukatela, a Croatian survey engineer, named the region in 1992. He also computed the exact coordinates using Google Maps data and compared them to his initial findings. The exact coordinates of this remote marine location are reported to be 48°52.6’S 123°23.6’W.
The spaceship cemetery
It’s understandable that Point Nemo is the best spot to crash a satellite in a controlled manner because dropping satellites from a considerable height is unlikely to injure anyone.
In a 2018 paper, Stijn Lemmens, a space debris expert at the European Space Agency in Darmstadt, Germany, stated that “its most attractive feature for controlled re-entries is that nobody is living there.”
“Coincidentally, it is also biologically not very diverse. So it gets used as a dumping ground — ‘space graveyard’ would be a more polite term—mainly for cargo spacecraft,” he told AFP.
Some 250 to 300 spacecraft, the majority of which burned up as they made their way through Earth’s atmosphere, have been laid to rest there.
Russia’s MIR space lab, weighing 120 tonnes, was by far the heaviest object to descend from above and splash down at Point Nemo. This happened in 2001.
It also implies that there could be some interesting space trash beneath the water, but can we go and see it? The answer is no, because the sea is around 13,000 feet (or two and a half miles) deep.
Are there any environmental implications?
There have been concerns voiced regarding the spaceship cemetery’s environmental impact. Experts have frequently stated that it could put marine species in the South Pacific Ocean Uninhabited Region in danger.
However, scientists are attempting to address the issue by using ecologically friendly components while developing spacecraft.
In recent years, scientists have stated that most future spacecraft will be designed for doom, with materials that melt at lower temperatures, making them far less likely to survive re-entry and land on Earth.
For example, NASA and ESA are switching from titanium to aluminum fuel tanks. However, there is still a potential that something will go wrong.
Something similar happened to China’s Tiangong-1. It was China’s first manned prototype space lab, which began orbiting Earth in 2011. It was officially declared defunct in March 2016, when ground engineers lost communication. A few months later, satellite trackers reported that the Chinese space agency no longer had control of the spacelab.
It subsequently began its plunge towards a fiery conclusion, reentering the Earth’s atmosphere about 00:16 UTC on April 2, 2018, over the South Pacific Ocean at 24.5°S 151.1°W.
According to Chinese state news agency Xinhua, the station largely burned up upon re-entry. There are no reports of injuries, however a fisherman from the nearby island of Maupiti is thought to have witnessed the incident.